DAVID T. WIECK although an ideal politics might simply be conceived of as the arrangement of human life on agreeable and rational principles from whence the entire notion of power over others should be banished, one must confess that this is not what constitutes the political as we know it, and it is to this that we must address ourselves.» Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1970, pp. 23-24.) On this model («the political as we know ih) we may conceive of the politics of production and consumption, the politics of education, the politics of race, the politics of religion, the politics of art, the politics of age -and the politics of every social sphere, the conventionally political included, in which a group or class or caste dominates others, or some institutional complex rules the lives of people. In many of these spheres, exchangeable slogans of «freedom» and «liberation,» and more problematic slogans of <,power» as well, have been raised. As might be expected, there is also a politics of liberation -- a politics of overt or covert power-structures that control particular movements of liberation. We shall have in mind, then, a panoply of «political,, relationships, among them, masters and slaves, governors and governed, propertied and propertyless, employers and employees, male and female, teachers and students, old and young (and young and old), dominant and subjugated races, party leaders and party members, bureaucrats and clients, labor leaders and rank and file, commanders and troops, priests and their flocks (and on some views: God and human being), imperial nations and subject-peoples, liberators and those whom they propose to liberate. With respect to each of the power-relationships one can identify a distinctive ideology, sometimes formally articulated, although rarely with the thoroughness of orthodox Leninism, sometimes primitive or parasitic on other ideologies. Anarchism can be understood as the generic social and political Idea that expresses negation of all power, sovereignty, domination, and hierarchical division, and a will to their dissolution; and expresses rejection of all the dichotomizing concepts that on ground of Nature, Reason, History, God or other, divide people into those dominant and those justly subordinated. Anarchism is therefore far more than anti-statism, but government (the state), as claimant to ultimate sovereignty and hence to the right to outlaw or legitimate particular sovereignties, and because sustained from self-interest by those who guard particular fiefs and turfs, stands at the center of 30
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